


Unspeakable Beauty

by mechaieh (ribbons)



Category: Angels in America - Kushner
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2005-10-21
Updated: 2005-10-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 06:34:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,525
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1636688
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ribbons/pseuds/mechaieh
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Harper Pitt in San Francisco.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unspeakable Beauty

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Luna

 

 

There were times Harper missed the Valium and its pseudo-life-raft of fantasies. There were   
weeks where she considered sampling some of the peculiar herbs her younger roommate   
cheerfully offered to share -- Helen was dating the son of a Chinese apothecary. There were   
months she thought about taking up a more traditional, non-prescription addiction such as   
tobacco or marijuana. There were days when she succumbed to temptation and splurged on   
a glass of wine or a shot of gin, even though she generally avoided alcohol because of the   
cost: her wages as a bookstore clerk simply didn’t go very far, and much as she wanted to   
stop using Joe’s credit card, she needed it to help pay for her share of the groceries and   
utilities.

But she spent as little of his money as she could: wouldn’t Joe himself move on, someday,   
sooner or later? She hadn’t asked for a divorce, and presumably he didn’t need one to set   
up - whatever it was one set up with other men, if and when one got that far -- but the card   
in her possession had an expiration date, and beyond that, Harper didn’t know quite how she   
would stay out of debt, not with paying her own rent and medical insurance. When the new   
card arrived -- sent to her care of San Francisco State, after she’d taken classes there for a   
couple of years -- she’d stared at it for a long, long time, and considered getting very, very   
drunk, but then her other roommate Olivia had come home, seen the look on her face, and   
steered her back out of the apartment and over to Grace Cathedral. Harper had paced in, around, and through its outdoor labyrinth all night long while Olivia perched   
some distance away -- close enough to keep watch, far enough for Harper to ignore her.

A little while after dawn, they’d picked up coffee and bagels and moved to a bench near the   
Fountain of the Tortoises, watching the water gush and dance over half-crumbling limestone   
as the city began to awake around them. They were perhaps dressed a bit scruffily for   
Huntingdon Park -- Harper in the jeans and sweatshirt she favored both for shelving books   
and studying them, Olivia in her customary slightly frayed-at-the-hems bartender's black - but if any of the   
well-dressed regulars or their dogs disapproved, neither Harper nor Olivia noticed -- neither   
Harper, talking about her never-quite-husband, nor Olivia, listening listened, fingers steepled   
together, agreeing with Harper’s decision to treat Joe’s subsidy of her expenses as a sort of   
scholarship -- his help with her room and board and tuition until she could truly support   
herself.

If she’d harbored any inclination whatsoever to sleep with a woman, it would have been with   
Olivia, who closely resembled one of the Renaissance angels on the cover of the season’s   
bestselling coffee-table books. Harper did occasionally bring home co-workers named   
Michael and Gabriel and Rafael -- and also ones with distinctly non-Biblical names such as   
Jeff and Ron and Claude. The sex was mostly good; it was about curiosity, and relief, and   
comfort -- not about love -- and everyone understood this, Harper included.

Harper liked understanding things. She liked the bookstore’s policy of letting her borrow   
two books at a time; she read about gay sex and quantum physics and how to find the best   
bargains in the Bay Area. She visited Grace Cathedral during the day, studying its portraits   
of John Donne and Mary Magdalene, and the French angels in its stained glass windows,   
and the murals of Francis Drake and Fray Serra and other luminaries. She especially liked   
the story of a patron who had demanded that the angels in one panel be painted over; she   
would have banished the winged creature who kept revisiting her own dreams with showers   
of stars if she could.

Sometimes the angel wore the face of an English actress; sometimes it spoke with the voice   
of her mother-in-law. Sometimes its eyes were those of a sick man she had met back in   
Manhattan once or twice -- the one who had told her about San Francisco while she petted a   
stray cat. Sometimes it resembled her co-worker Miles, a gaunt Scot in his late twenties with   
greying hair and a prematurely lined face; she occasionally wondered whether he, too, was   
ill with AIDS, but he offered few details and she refrained from pressing him for more. She   
sometimes went to his apartment for dinner -- Miles himself wasn’t much of a cook, but the   
meals were mostly prepared by his roommate Polly (a tow-haired antiquarian from London   
with beautiful hands and a voice like honey) and her girlfriend Renee (a pert contralto who   
favored men’s clothing and seemed permanently stalled on her dissertation on Lassus), with   
Miles and Harper sharing clean-up duty. After Olivia moved away, it was sometimes Miles   
who accompanied Harper on late evening walks down Lombard Street and midnight visits to   
the Grace Cathedral labyrinth, and sometimes they simply sat on his balcony, wrapped in   
worn blankets and cradling mugs of hot tea as they chatted through the small hours, waiting   
for drowsiness to overtake the demons they couldn’t out-talk or out-work.

Six years after Harper moved to San Francisco, she had become an assistant manager at the   
bookstore. She was cutting open a box of books in the back room when one of the clerks   
showed in Mother Pitt.

Harper was proud of how she managed not to fling her utility knife halfway across the   
room, and of how her voice remained steady once she retrieved it. She said the first coherent   
sentence that materialized in her head: "My shift’s over at 3. Meet you for coffee across the   
street?"

Mother Pitt nodded. Her hair was softer and more stylish, and her clothing smarter, and it   
occurred to Harper that her own appearance might perhaps be a shock to the older woman   
as well: these days, she wore her hair in a thick braid that reached her waist, and this   
morning she’d donned a black tank top and an embroidered Indian skirt with dozens of tiny   
mirrors stitched into the fabric. Her arms were toned from the hundreds of books she’d   
unloaded, hauled, shelved, rearranged, and repacked for returns, and her legs equally sturdy   
from the hundreds of hours minding information desks and cash registers. She probably   
looked very _San Franciscan_ to someone like Mother Pitt ... but Mother Pitt looked   
more like a New Yorker than Harper had ever imagined her capable of becoming, and the   
expression Harper glimpsed in her eyes as she turned to leave was closer to approval than   
any Harper had previously received from that face.

Over their drinks, Mother Pitt wasted no time. "Joe is dying, Harper."

"AIDS?"

"Yes."

Harper drew the credit card out of her purse and held it out to Mother Pitt, who shook her   
head. "I see no reason... why you shouldn’t make use of whatever’s left. Why you   
wouldn’t make good use of it."

Harper frowned. "I haven’t been his wife for years."

Mother Pitt locked eyes with her. "He has no one else but me, and I don’t need it."

Harper let the card slide onto the table between them. "Do you need --- help, nursing   
him?"

Mother Pitt said, "I have some friends who are helping." Her lips twisted. "I didn’t come   
here to ask you for that. I just wanted to assure myself that you knew. To tie up the loose   
ends I could."

"And?"

"I can’t save him. That’s no one’s job, at this point. No one here, at any rate. But if you   
have it in you to pray..."

Harper gazed at the older woman’s face. Yes, this was a face of her angel. Hannah Pitt,   
threshold of revelation-who would have thought? Not her, not until now. "I don’t. I don’t   
say prayers anymore, that is. But I have plenty of vacation time to burn."

"It won’t be a vacation," Hannah emphasized.

"I can’t save him either," Harper said.

The day before she flew back East, Harper sat on Miles’s balcony, sipping a final cup of   
tea.

"I should like to visit New York City someday," Miles said softly.

"It can be very pretty," Harper answered. "Even when it is brutally cold, the women wear   
colorful scarves... as do some of the men," she added, thinking of the angel in her dream   
the night before. Mother Pitt had shown her a photograph of her best friend in the city, who   
closely resembled the sick man Harper remembered from her last visit to the Mormon   
Center; he had appeared in her dream wearing stylish wire-rimmed spectacles, black   
academic robes, a gaudy purple hood with ornate gold trim, and a matching pair of silver-  
tinged, thickly feathered wings.

Miles looked wistful. "And there are skaters in the winter?"

"And thousands of ice drops multiplying the lights in the trees."

"That sounds unspeakably beautiful."

Harper paused. She remembered her very first sight of the city--the lights of the Bay a glittering  
tangle of constellations, their brightness greeting her as her plane glided toward the earth --

"In certain ways," she said, slowly, "it’s not so unlike San Francisco."

 


End file.
